How to Get Photos Organized

• 1). Gather every unframed photo you can find. Check dresser and desk drawers, closets, even your purse and wallet. Look through greeting cards you've accumulated--especially holiday cards.
  
  
• 2). Use newspaper sheets to make mats onto which you will make your initial sorting. Label these sheets with appropriate date categories. If you are sorting photos from only the last few years, use a marker to write the year on each sheet. However, if you are sorting 30 years of photos, start by labeling the newspaper sheets by decade. Find a place to work where you will be able to leave the newspaper mats in place for the days (or weeks) it takes to finish your sorting.
  
  
• 3). Take a stack of dated photos and begin the sorting process. If you are fortunate enough to have photos printed or written with the date, that's where you'll start. Simply start dealing the photos out onto their appropriate mats: the 1980s, for example, or 2007.
  
  
• 4). Play detective to sort the undated photos. An easy example: Billy's birthday cake has three candles, and he is wearing an orange dinosaur shirt. Find all the photos obviously from that day and put them all together on the correct mat. For tougher problems, scour the photos for clues: Your parents moved from their large home in 1980, so the photo has to have been taken in the 1980s.
  
  
• 5). Continue the sorting by further delineating the mats. Take the decade mats and make a line dividing them in half and place the pictures appropriately. Take the yearly mats and divide them into seasons: Put the Halloween photos in the fall section, for example, and follow through in this way for other holidays, family birthdays and other gatherings.
  
  
• 6). Turn over all undated photos and mark with the date using a light-colored permanent marker. If you know the specific date--as in a child's birthday, for example--use that date. Otherwise, label with "early 1970s" or "winter 2008." When you start removing the photos from the mat, you'll be able to identify any photos that become separated from their groups.
  
  
• 7). Use photo albums if you like, for storing photos, but an easier fix is to buy photo boxes with dividers that you can label appropriately. Simply create an "early 1970s" section and slide the photos in.